Part 22

"Only seventeen."

"You can't do it again."

"One never can tell."

"Play," she defied.

Gerard glanced hopelessly at the streaming windows.

"It is growing late," he demurred.

"Not late, yet. Besides, we can't go out in that weather with an open automobile. They know at home where we are."

They did; that was precisely the core of Gerard's exasperation and unrest. What impressions would this tête-à-tête afternoon convey to Corrie? And what would Flavia think of her guest's guardianship of her cousin? He picked up his cue with enforced resignation.

The clock had struck the half-hour, when a long blast from an electric horn pierced through the clamor of the storm.

"Another motor-party caught out," Isabel hazarded, her tone decidedly cross. She was losing again, and she did not like the experience. "Your play. You seem to find it more amusing to look out the window."

Gerard was spared reply. The billiard-room door was pushed open by the Japanese steward and a figure in gleaming rain-proof attire appeared on the threshold--the figure of a chauffeur, cap in hand.

"Lenoir!" Isabel exclaimed.

The chauffeur saluted.

"Mr. Rose sent the limousine to convey mademoiselle and Mr. Gerard," he informed them, in his precise, Parisian-flavored English.

"My uncle is home?"

"I had just driven Mr. Rose home from the city, mademoiselle, before he telephoned to the garage that I should come here."

She tossed her cue upon the table, recklessly scattering the balls, and turned toward the door.

"Bring our wraps, Koma," she bade. "We had better go."

Gerard contemplated Lenoir with marked kindness.

"It's a bad day to be out," he commented, in following Isabel from the room, and passed into the chauffeur's hand a gratuity out of all proportion to the occasion.

"Yes, sir," said Lenoir, demurely.

The drive home was short and uninteresting. On the veranda of the Rose villa Corrie was waiting to meet the returning two, upon the limousine's arrival.

"Well, of all the slow traveling I ever saw, this is the limit," he greeted them derisively; "From noon until five o'clock! Fancy!"

"Never mind our driving; we have had a fine time," Isabel retorted, with pettish tartness.

"Yes, ma'am, no doubt. I wouldn't have interrupted, myself. It was father who did it, when he came in. He said you'd want some dinner to-night."

He smiled at Gerard as cordially as ever, but there was a wistfulness underlying his expression that inspired the older man with a hearty desire to shake Isabel Rose. She could watch her young lover's emotions with the same diverted interest with which she had watched the struggles of the tiny black-and-scarlet beetle drowning in her finger-bowl.

"I wish you had been with us, Corrie," was all Gerard found to say.

Through the parted curtains, the library presented such a graceful interior study as certain French artists have delighted in drawing. In the octagonal, book-lined room of rich hues and soft lights, Flavia and her father were seated together; busied in pleasant comradeship at the table whose polished surface was littered with letters, books of household accounts, and all those dainty metal and crystal trinkets the jeweller conceives necessary to the writer. Evidently they had found refreshment desirable, for a diminutive tea-table still stood near Flavia, while a pushed-back chair beneath which a young Great Dane hound lay asleep indicated that Corrie had been one of the group.